avoiding misery lane

It's been a while. Things have changed.  The position that was wonderful ended, as I knew it would, but so far nothing has come after it.

Well, okay, not nothing.  I've done things.  I deep cleaned my bathroom, I went through all my jeans and got rid of half of them.  I have so many boxes of clothes to get rid of, and a porch I haven't yet cleaned.  I mowed and repaired a ton of stuff at my partner's house, and deep cleaned the hell out of it. I put a hand rail on the wall by myself.  I'm pretty proud.  It's about the most I've done in...well, it's been months now.

Nothing has materialized, outside of the dregs of employment.  Oh sure, I had an offer last week--from a sketchy place that was essentially a telemarketing firm that now operated through email a few blocks too far into the bad part of town.  I was sent there by an equally sketchy employment agency who unceremoniously told me, "Well if you don't take this job, I'd hate to see another two months go by and you still aren't working."

Ouch, lady.

What she failed to realize was that I haven't been working because I've been picky. I have to be. I'll be 36 next month and it weighs on me almost constantly.  I started doing mturk this week. Transcription and surveys, through Amazon.  I love typing, I love academia, and I love surveys.  My opinion is needed and willing to be compensated!  Every survey looks the same after a while, the same questions. My last year's salary?  Next to nothing; I was doing a term of service and okay with living in poverty.  

My age.  There's a seemingly infinite number of ways to sort ages demographically, and not all of them are pretty.  The nice ones lump 35 in with the mid 30s.  One I took the other day listed "35-44". Yikes.  Serious numbers, right there.  Heavy numbers.  Burdensome, almost.

So age weighs on me.  My lumbering, silent but lethal giant named "student loan debt" lurks in the background, breathing.  Heavily.  I was fortunate enough to earn an education award at the end of my term of service.  I don't remember exactly how much it is.  I haven't bothered to look because it would be like trying to fill a lake with a thimble.  It's a nice sentiment, but certainly not going to appease the sleeping beast--and why I've tried so hard to cling to staying in non-profit.  Six words are my hopeful savior:

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program.

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Program forgives the remaining balance on your Direct Loans after you have made 120 qualifying monthly payments under a qualifying repayment plan while working full-time for a qualifying employer. 

To sound, as the parlance of our times would say, like a basic white girl (what even IS that?): I CAN'T EVEN.

Qualifying employment for the PSLF Program is not about the specific job that you do for your employer. Rather, it is about who your employer is. Employment with the following types of organizations qualifies for PSLF:

• Government organizations at any level (federal, state, local, or tribal)
• Not-for-profit organizations that are tax-exempt under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code
• Other types of not-for-profit organizations that provide certain types of qualifying public services

Serving in a full-time AmeriCorps or Peace Corps position also counts as qualifying employment for the PSLF Program.

I mean honestly.  HONESTLY!!  The only thing that will slay that suffocating beast once and for all, since as I have often quipped to people, "I'll be dead twice over before I'd ever be able to pay it off myself."  (It's a lot.)

So no, surly woman from the sketchy temp agency, your idle threats are not enough to get me to cave and work for the pittance your client demands.  I love typing--but sure as hell not that much.Options get a bit limited at this point.  Okay, they are really limited and I am running out of time. I have fought and scratched and kicked and screamed like hell because I absolutely, positively, under no circumstances want to go back to retail.  At all.  Ever.  Period.  Unless I have to.This has brought forth varying well meaning but largely uninformed comments from people who (I know truly do) care about me--and I know they care because when I was in a serious funk the other night and poured it all out, they were there for me.  


Side note--I used to feel bad about talking about my emotions and struggles.  I used to think I should always try to be a model person so as not to make myself stand out from more "normal" people.  Even though I know this to be a foolish and false truth, the stigma is there.  I've taken some inspiration from Daniel P. Finney, who has been sharing his journey with weight loss and the mental health issues that surround it.  He will undoubtedly feel awkward if I tell him about this shout out, but I had to stop and say that if he can write about it for a newspaper with the circulation size of the The Des Moines Register, what's to say I can't get a little blue in a Facebook post?


Anyway, I'm stubbornly trying to stay out of retail for the following very valid reasons:

• I'm getting too old for this shit.  No, really.  Time is fleeting.  I don't just feel that when I fill out surveys.  I feel it in my body more these days, when I can't sit a certain way the same way I used to be able to.  My (amazing, destined for sainthood) partner of ten (up, down, backwards, sideways, crazy) years has frequently told me this.  He's older than me, he always has been, but I see both of us getting older now.  He kept telling me this would happen someday.  He was right. (he usually is)  Time is fleeting.  I'm getting too old for this shit, too old to work somewhere where I get nowhere.

• I got so incredibly far off track the last time I got into retail I'm not even remotely close to getting back to where I started.  I started at Starbucks what seems like an eternity ago, in 2010, after taking what I thought would be a temporary break from my master's work. (helpful note: try to take some time off between undergrad and grad school, lest you burn out at your own risk)  I had only planned on being there a short time; I was there a month shy of FOUR YEARS.  Four years where I got so completely behind and off track from my work that I don't even know if I'm anywhere near finishing my degree now at this point.  I took the job and I got sucked in, and it was okay, for a while.  Then things sort of went to pieces in our relationship, and I moved out of my partner's house. (Yes, we put a lot of work into things and managed to turn the ship around.  I know, we're amazing.)  It then became a way to survive, as I was the only one supporting me--finishing my degree wasn't even possible at that point.  It wasn't possibly logistically, financially, and one more point, probably most importantly...

• Retail made me a terrible person.  An awful, negative, spiteful, angry, vengeful person. I was a person that was Not Fun To Be Around.  I didn't like myself much, which sure didn't help.  It's funny, I ended up being probably the most positive and encouraging person in our Public Allies class because I completely LOVED NOT being that Horrible Person anymore.  That, and I was trying like hell to make sure people didn't make the mistakes I made.  Now that time and panic have set in, I see that person creeping back and that person is not who I want to be.  I was in such dire straits then.  Every minute I wasn't at work I dreaded going and every minute I was there I longed to be anywhere else.  The days I was home were never enough to try to rebuild myself enough to face another work day.  I attempted to cope in productive and non-productive ways and methods, not all of which were good or bad.  I hated life, I hated everything, I hated where my life was going, I hated how truly terrible of a situation I ended up finding myself in. 

My dear partner: "You liked working there!"  To some extent, yes, indeed I did. But ultimately not a large enough extent to make it remotely worth it.  I hesitate to think what might have happened to me had I not been "fortunate" enough to have a complete mental break down at work (oh, and nobody really cared much or showed any compassion to me about it, AND I got written up for it because someone essentially got his "feelings hurt". LOL, okay buddy, try being in my shoes?) and come home fed up enough to comb through Craigslist to find something, ANYTHING that wasn't this dark hole of an existence I was in.  It took six long, agonizing weeks of bothering the lovely person who ultimately became my program manager, but I finally found my ladder out.  Yes. Public service, here I come.

Of course my sadistic manager had not only driven me to the brink, but she had also driven away four other long term partners (what we were called there) away, people who had been there four, five, six, and seven years with the company.  She was silently expecting me to fill their shoes, instead I drop new availability on her--I'm going part-time!  Your punching bag will be here no more to deal with your incompetent BS anymore!

...of course she found a big enough loophole to "separate" me, and two months before most of my stock grants fully vested.  Now THAT, I still have reason to be bitter for...mostly because I'd fully intended to quit December 1st, after that happened.  But anyway.  I did fight it, just because it was BS and because I'd had such a long standing case open with Partner Resources anyway (going back into July, and I was separated on September 5th, one month short of my four year anniversary with the company) because the store was Just That Terrible.  Ultimately, my intended result didn't happen--she's still there, and another person has reached out to me to give me the unsurprising news that she is the new target of my old manager's scorn.  I gave them enough ammo, they should have had plenty to fire with.  I think there are reasons why it didn't happen, I'm uncomfortable with those reasons, but it is what it is.

...given all that, I don't think I can find it in myself to do anything like that again.  Not even so much because of the circumstances, though that was certainly out of the ordinary. No, it's because I know myself, and my predilections and my emotional capability, and because I promised myself if I ever got out of that situation alive, that I would never, ever, EVER let myself get into that situation again.  I don't break promises easily, not even to myself.

Again, my saintly partner (except I don't think he can get sainthood with his actual name, so that might not be an actual option): "I want you to be happy and hate it when you're not."  Which really brings up another point I guess I almost forgot to make.

• I have been an unequal partner in my relationship for most of it.  Yes, I realize relationships are not equal by their very nature.  I get that.  However, it's been pretty lop-sided for a pretty long time.  I want to balance things out.  Not even just in that relationship, but all of mine.  My parents, my brother and his kids, my partner's family...everyone I know!  I want to be doing much, much more than I am right now and that takes time and money, two of which there is very little of in retail.  For the record, there's no pressure from anyone but myself about this issue, just a bunch of old fashioned guilt and humbleness and gratitude and wanting to return the favor, you know?

Anyway...a lot of you wrote very nice things the other day which I haven't read just yet because I was pretty emotional when I posted and I'm not quite ready to read all of them right now.  Thank you for that, though--it means a lot.

I suppose I'm at a point where I have few other options left, but the TL;DR really is: I don't want to, and I have very valid reasons for not doing so, and if I do, it is because I have literally no other options left.  For now, the job search continues, and the HITs do on Mechanical Turk do as well.